Company employees increasingly use their choice of mobile devices to carry out mobile business processes. IT departments are therefore faced with the challenge of centrally managing several mobile platforms simultaneously. When an enterprise deploys mobile devices of different types and platforms, different management systems corresponding to the different devices and platforms are usually employed. This is typically because device manufacturers and vendors are interested in delivering mobile device management solutions that are specific to their own devices and that support their own product range. These systems allow an administrator to manage devices over-the-air, including activating devices, distributing software and applications, locking or wiping devices, enforcing and resetting device passwords, setting IT policies, and managing optional mobile applications for end users.
An organization wishing to deploy mobile devices from more than one manufacturer is faced with implementing and managing multiple management solutions. For example, different types of devices may run on different operating systems and therefore require different types of management systems suited to their respective operating systems. Furthermore, there may be different device platform capabilities, with some devices further limited by the design of their operating system. A challenge presented by this arrangement is that when an enterprise customer wants to provision different types of devices across its enterprise network it may have separate device management systems and configuration databases that correspond to the different types of devices.
Further problems occur if an employee is assigned one or multiple mobile devices; the person is usually represented by an “account” on each of the disparate management systems corresponding to the device type they have been given. This results in multiple “accounts” for the one person. A problem with this “multiple accounts/one user” situation arises when attempting to manage the “one” user and his/her “multiple devices” from a single management location.
Another difficulty presented by this arrangement is that the user and/or the enterprise network may have different requirements for each of the user's accounts on the different devices. Also, the enterprise network might impose different policies, permissions and guidelines for each device type even though the accounts on each device belong to the same user.